Mozilla makes a good chunk of its revenues from a search deal with Google. So for all of you reading this blog on a Firefox web browser, Mozilla staffers that worked on this, were in part paid (indirectly) from that deal.

If you happen to be running Firefox on Ubuntu, that’s going to change.

You see, Canonical the lead sponsor behind Ubuntu has struck it’s own search deal with Yahoo. So Canonical will make money from Yahoo searches (really Microsoft now with Bing powering Yahoo search) to help fund their efforts.

The way I see it, that leaves the good people at Mozilla out of the money loop and I don’t think that’s fair. Sure it’s open source and everyone contributes and then pulls back out of it and that’s the way it works, but do Linux users really want a Microsoft powered default search engine for Firefox?? I don’t think so.

So why is Canonical pulling this (boneheaded) move?

“I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform,” Canonical’s Rick Spencer wrote in a mailing list post.”This change will help provide these resources as well as continuing to respect our user’s default search across Firefox.”

Well you can’t fault Canonical for trying to make a $. But as a Linux user, you can’t fault me for changing my default search engine back to Google either.

The search engine change is expect to occur of Ubuntu next major release, Lucid Lynx.